Photo: LagunaticPhoto
For the past five years, the City of Dana Point has been entrenched in a heated beach access battle with the Surfrider Foundation and California Coastal Commission. The battle is being waged over the City’s blocking of public access to the middle of Strands Beach by limiting access hours and putting up locked gates at the Strands Headlands development. On Thursday, September 17, 2015, the Superior Court ruled that this move was an illegitimate exercise of authority by the City Council and was, in fact, “pretext for avoiding the requirements” of the Coastal Act. That is, the court held that the City illegally declared a bogus “nuisance” in order to pass an ordinance to curtail access to the beach.
Judge Trapp’s ruling found that the City could not demonstrate that there was an actual or prospective nuisance occurring at the Strands Beach, despite the City official’s claims of “sex, drugs, and rock n roll” as an excuse to limit access. In analyzing the issue, the court found that the City offered no rational basis for the action and “nothing more than speculation, conjecture and fear mongering.”
This issue began with the 2004 approval of the Strands Headlands development of multi-million dollar homes on the beach. In exchange for a development permit, the Coastal Commission required that there be ample public beach access at this development, including an open accessway from the middle of the parking lot down to the beach. Since the inception of the California Coastal Act in 1976, the Commission has been working with municipalities up and down the coast to amicably resolve access and safety concerns. Unfortunately, in this case, the City of Dana Point refused to work with the Coastal Commission and enacted an “urgency ordinance” declaring existence of a nuisance at the site and mandating the enforcement of restrictive closure hours for Central and Mid-Strands Accessway.
Photo: Courtesy of Surfrider
The recent ruling invalidates the City’s efforts to block the beach for lack of evidentiary support and apparent disingenuous motivation for enacting the ordinance, that is, to avoid Coastal Commission jurisdiction.
The result of this case is that the Coastal Commission will now have the ability to overrule any unreasonable curtailment of public beach access at Strands, including the restrictive hours and gates through the Mid-Strands access way. This case will now set statewide precedent to support the Coastal Act protections for beach access and the Coastal Commission’s authority to regulate cities and counties that attempt to evade those requirements.
The City has now lost four court rulings in five years on this issue. With this latest and strongest ruling, Surfrider Foundation’s and the Coastal Commission’s beach access protection efforts have been vindicated, and the public’s right to access the California coastline is stronger than ever.
